Railroads Over the Divide

Building a railroad through the Rocky Mountains was an engineering challenge that defeated several conventional approaches. The transcontinental railroad of eighteen sixty-nine had threaded through Wyoming's relatively gentle terrain. Colorado's mountains were a different problem: narrower canyons, steeper grades, higher passes, and terrain that made standard railroad equipment useless.

William Jackson Palmer, a Civil War cavalry general from Pennsylvania, founded the Denver and Rio Grande Railway in eighteen seventy with an ambitious goal: to build a line connecting Denver to Mexico City. He chose narrow-gauge track, three feet between the rails rather than the standard four feet eight and a half inches, which allowed the locomotives to navigate sharper curves and steeper grades than conventional equipment could handle.

The narrow-gauge lines threaded through the Royal Gorge of the Arkansas River, a canyon with walls rising steeply on both sides of the river. They climbed over high mountain passes and reached mining towns that no standard-gauge railroad could access. The line from Durango to Silverton, built in eighteen eighty-two through the Animas River Canyon, survives today as a working steam railroad and one of the most scenic rail journeys in North America, operating on tracks laid nearly a hundred and fifty years ago.

Other Colorado railroads made equally audacious climbs. The Colorado Midland crossed the Continental Divide near eleven thousand nine hundred foot Hagerman Pass. Each one was an answer to the same basic question: can a locomotive be made to go somewhere this steep? In Colorado, the answer was almost always yes.